As the other blog posts about The 42nd Parallel have hinted at, the format of John Dos Passos’s “Newsreel” and “Camera eye” sections were what really made this book stick out (negatively or positively depending on the person). While at first I found it slightly hard to follow, the more I read it the more I got use it. Yet, thinking back on this style and wondering where Dos Passos’s would have gotten it from, I can only think of a few other books that share similar interjections or formats that contribute to the time and space of the book (or just help narrate the story). The book that most shares this style to me is Rant: The Oral Biography of Buster Casey by Chuck Palahniuk. In Rant, it was a radio host who provided updates on situations around town. In particular, the updates were very similar to the “Camera eye” and helped tie the story together to provide a larger view of everything happening around it. While the “Camera eye” in The 42nd Parallel describes Dos Passos real life, the radio communicator in Rant, provides essential details on a story outside of the main narration.
This type of style, while somewhat different, was also used in the movie The Warriors. In the movie, it was a radio DJ who provided the extra narration. This extra information that the DJ provided was more linked to the main story than how Dos Passos’s “Camera eye” or Newsreel” seems to come off, but it still was an interjection that could have been cut out. The extra narrations don’t truly play a part in the main story line, they just help provide a bit of extra context to the stories.
While the other two examples seemed to follow a more coherent strategy, Dos Passos’s work does have a rhythm or pattern to it once you get further into the reading. Now it can be very discouraging and frustrating at first when reading this but the little bit of information you can gather from these sections do somewhat let you know about the author and maybe how he wants this novel to come across. Or maybe he just wants to frustrate his audience. It’s kind of hard to tell at times. Yet, this is a very daring and interesting format he chose to write in. And it has to have paid off seeing that there are very similar styles being implemented out there.
In a way, we can think of the Newsreels as experimental narrative exposition: they are not, as you suggest, as intimately tied to the narrative or context as the other examples you note, but they do suggest a broader historical and cultural contexts. In a way, they exist on a different plane than the other elements as the exposition is divorced from individual lives, and from DP’s own life (as it comes across in the Camera Eyes). It is interesting to think of other semi-experimental ways that authors or film-makers have tried to signal the context for a story beyond traditional modes of exposition.